One neglected issue here is the role of government funding agencies and universities in controlling who gets funded. It's common practice for universities to e

One neglected issue here is the role of government funding agencies and universities in controlling who gets funded. It's common practice for universities to encourage their own researchers to get government positions at funding agencies, where they can help shepherd grants back to their parent institutions, for example. Something like this seems to have gone on with Alzheimer's funding - some people involved with the source lab ended up directing funding at the federal level. So, if you're a researcher who decides to publish refutation of a fundamental claim by the leading stars in the field, you risk getting on a funding blacklist, and your grant review doesn't get approved. Hence, the safer thing to do is simply ignore the research you suspect to be fraudulent and take your own research in a different direction. There's also the concept that they don't want to discredit the entire field by exposing fraud and thereby risk Congress spiking the funding entirely or something like that. Incidentally, a lot of the silence on the very plausible notion that Sars-CoV2 escaped from a lab, and that its transmissibiliy and virulence likely were increased in the lab as a consequence of various gain-of-function (well-meaning I suppose) research techniques (serial passage, CRISPR engineering, etc.), appears to be due to similar concerns (i.e. researcher who even discuss the possiblity might run afoul of people like Fauci and cohort who still control virology research funding).